Thursday, April 13, 2017

April 13, 2017 (Dailymail) Secretary
of State Rex Tillerson is leaving Moscow empty-handed following two hours of
frosty talks with Vladimir Putin -
without even a snapshot with the Russian president to show for it. Instead he
got a public lecture on America's past actions in the Middle East from Putin's
foreign minister, and reminded of Sean Spicer's Hitler gaffe by a Russian
reporter. And he could not even get agreement that Bashar al-Assad's used
chemical weapons, with the Kremlin insisting that the Syrian dictator did not gas his own
people and the Trump official asserting that he did.

FROSTY START: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
welcomes US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson before their meeting in Moscow

At a joint news conference after the
meeting Putin's foreign minister demanded evidence of the assault - and ofRussian's meddling in the American
election - as he reminded the world of the United States' rocky record with
regime changes, using Iraq and Libya as examples. The deepening split between
the Trump administration and the government the Republican politician had been
accused of colluding with to win his election was on full display Wednesday as
the diplomats made a host of conflicting claims about current affairs. Tillerson
frankly told reporters that US-Russia relations were at a 'low point' while he
issued a Cold War-style warning that the nuclear powers could not have have a bitter
relationship.